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An anonymous reader writes "AOL.com users may think they have up to sixteen characters to use as a password, but they'd be wrong, thanks to this security artifact detailed by The Washington Post's Security Fix blog:
"Well, it turns out that when someone signs up for an AOL.com account, the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL's system, however, doesn't read past the first eight characters."
This means that a user who uses "password123" or any other obvious eight-character password with random numbers on the end is in effect using just that lame eight-character password."

MySpace has that issue as well, past 10 characters. If you go to their signup screen, you can sign up with a longer password, but if you go to the secondary login screen, it will stop typing either after 10 or 12 characters.

Real VNC 4 has this same problem. One of my clients uses it and set the password to a 12 key entry, with uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and a special character. Too bad most of his non-alphas were at the end...

Demon Internet in the UK were like that back in 1994 when I signed up. I had some issues and changed the password. I'd come up with this long obtuse password and he said "Oh don't worry, it only reads the first 8 characters anyway."

So I dumped the convoluted password and went with something with 8 characters.

Solaris (up to Solaris8 anyway) has exactly the same problem, I wouldn't be surprised if its widespread on older systems.

One thing I find interesting though, way back before the internet was well known (1990 or so I think) and people paid for CompuServe or AOL or whatever, I had a CompuServe account and the original password was 'wrote*admiral' and it definatly required all letters to be correct

NT4 broke a 16 character password and separately hashed the first and second parts so you could attack them separately. This is why passwords > 8 characters were recommended. Better than TFA, and (thankfully) fixed in NT5.

The Lanmanager hashing system breaks the password up into two 7-char sized chunks, converts them to upper case, and hashes each separately, and XP still uses Lanmanager hashes if you don't explicitly tell it not to (by changing a registry setting).

The first 14 characters are still used in Lanmanager hashes though, so this is only a security hole if the attacker can access the hashes.

I don't know about Gentoo specifically, but on most *NIX systems the convention is to put the default values in the example config file, commented out. This shows the user what the defaults are, and shows that they don't need to be explicitly stated.

I'm running an up-to-date Gentoo install, and have never knowingly touched that file. I just tried logging in as root, except typing only the first 8 characters of my password and then garbage. It didn't let me in.

Forgive me if I'm being a spaz, but isn't that line commented out in your example? It also seems to be commented out on my Gentoo box, which leads me to believe that it's commented out by default as it's a file I've never touched.

Furthermore I tried su'ing on that machine with only the first eight characters of my root password, and was denied access. So I'm concluding that it's not a problem in Gentoo by default.

# Number of significant characters in the password for crypt().
# Default is 8, don't change unless your crypt() is better.
# Ignored if MD5_CRYPT_ENAB set to "yes".
#
#PASS_MAX_LEN 8

# If set to "yes", new passwords will be encrypted using the MD5-based
# algorithm compatible with the one used by recent releases of FreeBSD.
# It supports passwords of unlimited length and longer salt strings.
# Set to "no" if you need to copy encrypted passwords to other systems
# which don't understand the new algorithm. Default is "no".
#
MD5_CRYPT_ENAB yes

Old DES crypt() hashing is only significant to 8 chars on any system. That's why modern systems (including Gentoo) use MD5 hashing by default which has no limit on the length of the password to hash. Notice that MD5_CRYPT_ENAB is set to "yes" above which causes it to ignore the PASS_MAX_LEN setting.

I spent all day yesterday giggling at "eLfavirenz" (its efavirenz- no L). While HIV/AIDS is far from a humorous disease, images of brazilian midgets with big ears and curl-toed shoes sneaking around with big bottles of pirated protease inhibitors kept jumping in my head.

For a second treat, google ELFavirenz and see the 260+ web sites that took the exact same text and put it up after/.'s error!

I can do this one better. I signed up for some game known as MapleStory a while back, submitting the password "DaedAEcarECel40s".

I quickly found that I could not log on to my account. I was wondering whether I misspelled my password or something, when I noticed (while reading the FAQ) in small print "Passwords must be 8 characters or less." Now, no warning of this was given anywhere on the sign up form.

In shock, I realized what the issue must have been. Sure enough, trying to log on with password "DaedAEca" worked like a charm.

Yes, not only did they not warn the user that there was a maximum on the password length while signing up, and not only did their form accept my 16-char password, but it actually would not let me log in with the full password. Man, I was pissed and confused for a while...

I really hope you don't use this password anywhere else. In fact I am curious to see how many people just tried to log into your slashdot account using that password. Maybe even hitting the MapleStory site just for a few random attempts as well:)

Yes, not only did they not warn the user that there was a maximum on the password length while signing up, and not only did their form accept my 16-char password, but it actually would not let me log in with the full password

When signing up with Absolute Poker, I created a password with a comma in it. It accepted it and created the account.

Then I went to log in. After entering my password, I got an immediate error "password may not contain comma" (or other characters). I had to manually request support to a

I believe the original RFC for radius only looked at the first 8 characters. It would not surprise me if AOL was using a tried and proven radius solution, and never bothered to update. I'd be interested to know the results if one was to choose a long password and then

1. Log into AOL and only use the first 8 characters2. Log into the AOL webmail and only use the first 8 characters.

This may indicate if the limitation is the sign in solution, or the entire userdb backend.

Man I noticed this years ago, wish I had thought it was important enough to write up about then maybe I could have had my own slashdot posting!(and yes that...sickeningly...means I actually used AOL for some time...)

I had a problem logging in to the AOL webmail because it *does not* truncate to the first 8 characters and I *thought* my password was longer than 8. Thus logging into the AOL app worked fine, but I had to manually truncate to 8 characters to get webmail working.

My AOL password happens to be exactly 8 characters long. When I tried salting it with asdf afterwards, the OS X AOL client (which I havn't opened in a year, mind you:-) will not accept characters after the 8th.

2. Log into the AOL webmail and only use the first 8 characters.

In this case, salting with asdfasdfasdf results in an error saying the password must be 16 characters or less, so salting it with asdfasdf (making the attempted password exactly 16 characters) I'm still allowed to log in, even though my true password doesn't contain the asdf's, and is only 8 c

It's worse than they make out. Back in December 06 I posted a synopsis of how the password hashing on AIM works. They ALSO remove all the 'weird' (read: non-alphanumeric) characters. So your "eight characters" may actually be only six or four - since it cuts the password down to eight before it removes the weird ones.

They also don't hash passwords anymore in your registry from AIM6 onward. They encrypt them, but that's a lot easier to get around than hashing.

If you really want a more detailed explanation you can take a look at the 12/29/06 and 12/30/06 posts on this page - http://tsourceweb.com/ [tsourceweb.com] - but what I already mentioned is the crux of the issue. (We all know people on Slashdot dont like to read articles anyway;)

The stored password in the registry cannot be a hash unless the authentication system on the remote end will accept the hash in place of the actual password, which is only marginally better than storing the password in plain text. Without some keychain system, the password cannot be encrypted and then decrypted again unless the decryption key is accessible to the user or the key is stored on the server, meaning that you only need the "encrypted" password to authenticate yourself. Depending on how the passwo

Before AIM6 the servers did accept a hash for login, but that's all you can do with it. (You can send a change email request with it, but that takes 72 hours and the user can cancel it during that time)AIM6 decrypts the password each time you log in and sends it plaintext over an SSL connection. I'd venture that storing a hash is more secure, because at least you have to crack that before you can change the user's password.

I can't think of any situation where a password stored plaintext or encrypted would

If this really is an artifact of the old 'core' of AOL, then it's probably due to the original password functions we put into PlayNET back in 1984-1985. (For those that don't know, AOL was originally a port of QuantumLink to the PC, and QuantumLink was licensed from PlayNET. See http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/PlayNET [wikipedia.com].)

The original core was all done in PL/1 on Stratus fault-tolerant minicomputers. They continued to run the core up until a few years ago, but much of the design was so ingrained that it contin

They also don't hash passwords anymore in your registry from AIM6 onward. They encrypt them, but that's a lot easier to get around than hashing.

Well, this is usually a trade-off between being able to have a secure authentication procedure (using challenge-response authentication) or not having to store the password in cleartext at the client. If you hash the password, you can't do a challenge-response authentication on that password (since it would need the cleartext password to be available at log-in tim

For random passwords, I guess 8 characters are still OK, but it's worse if you pick "smart" combinations of words and numbers, like "computers4life" or "jennifer2007". With dictionary attacks adapted for these lengths, they'd only need to check for the first 8 and it would be "computer" and "jennifer" in this case. If you further adapt the attack to only look for e.g. ratios of 4:4 with first 4 being a word and remaining 4 being random, and so on for 5:3, 6:2, 7:1, and 8:0, you also catch circumstances where users have picked passwords like "love4u2007", which would be caught in the "4:4" attack as "love" + "4u20". Maybe that's still secure enough, but this sounds a bit risky when using word passwords, even when mixing with numbers to avoid dictionary attacks, especially with this limitation.

At a certain university, this was also the case.The flaw in question seemed to apply only to a web mail client which they are in the process of phasing out in favor of an open source solution, which is pretty interesting because it's the first I've seen which has support for S/MIME.

Presumably, the older system will be brought off line soon, as the flaw has been known for some time.When signing on in front of people who didn't know about the flaw, it was fun to make them think you had a password in excess of

The latest AIX 5.3 has this same stupid limitation too. It's driving us nuts at work cause we authenticate to Active Directory which supports long passwords, but AIX only cares about the first 8. Ridiculous.. We had to purchase SpecOps and force AD to limit to max of 8 so that users would be forced to have a unique password everytime. We contacted IBM and they said they had no plans on fixing this.

Ah, but this is a different issue. This is some proprietary Unix password input functions only reading 8 characters, whereas the AOL one is more likely the crypt()-type problem of discarding all but the first 8 letters when hashing the password. Your case there isn't much you can do (as the input is discarded), but in the 2nd case, authenticating against anything but the local passwd/shadow file would fix it (e.g. pam_krb5 or pam_ldap would respect all the characters).Another reason not to use proprietary U

I believe I encountered this last year when I was trying to set my wife's AIM account up on her iChat client. She has been typing the long version of her pass into the AIM client, which apparently wasn't reading past those first 8 characters. When we tried it in the iChat client, it kept spitting it back out as being incorrect. We eventually had to change her pass to a shorter one to get it to work.

"You know when a company wants to use letters in their phone number, but often they'll use too many letters? 'Call 1-800-I-Really-Enjoy-Brand-New-Carpeting.' Too many letters, man, must I dial them all? 'Hello? Hold on, man, I'm only on "Enjoy." How did you know I was calling? You're good, I can see why they hired you!'"

First, this article is flat out wrong and I challenge you to try it yourself. The AOL service will only allow up to 8 character passwords for e-mail related items. My password for my AIM clients has always been greater than 8 characters and I *cannot* log into anything without typing the entire password. This includes any web-based service at *.aol.com (primarily controlled by my.screenname.aol.com). I am a bit perplexed at where this article is getting its information.

Notice it only allows you to choose a password that's 6-8 characters, just like the AOL service itself. So now try and login with your password that's 6-8 characters, but add a few more. It lets you in right? Ok, so do this... reset/change your password now. Click "Forgot my Password" or whatever the link is called. Go through the questions and set a new password. Oh wait, notice it only lets you pick a 6-8 character password.

What does this mean? It means for AOL-service based/AOL-mail based accounts, they only allow 6-8 characters for the password! Who cares if it accepts extra characters. There is a 6-8 character limitation. It's absolutely irrelevant that it accepts additional characters.

They seem to be confusing this with AIM-only based accounts, which allow up to 16 character passwords and DO NOT allow anything more or anything less than the *EXACT* password. Try it yourself. If my AIM password is "pCv921!$z" it will reject me if I put "pCv921!$" and it will reject me if I put "pCv921!$z44". This is not that big of a deal and certainly isn't embarrassing. This is flat out a difference in AOL's mail-based system vs. AOL's AIM-based system.

Want to know a big shocker about AOL's mail-based system that they didn't figure out and report on that *is* embarassing?

These AOL.com (mail-based) and AOL-service based account are *NOT* case sensitive. That's right, try and make your password with some uppercase letters. It doesn't make a difference if your 6-8 character password has uppercase letters or not. It doesn't recognize it! I didn't check but I don't believe it recognizes special characters either. So your character set is a-z0-9.

Just be warned if you decide to abort partway through the process (I was desperate for free internet access, but not enough to give up my CC info) they will STILL KEEP THE INFORMATION YOU ENTER. I got a phone call several days later from a rep with a sales pitch.

Although this was 3 years ago I don't think they'll have changed it...

Yes, absolutely. This is how I am trying to make a distinction between service/e-mail-based system and AIM-based systems. I am not sure of how to better word this. It appears some of these tie into the legacy system. This is similar to Basic Auth, but worse. There is no disctinction between uppercase and lowercase characters. However, I am not quite following Brian's blog to make this a huge security risk as they do not accurately make the distinction between the two systems or even recognize they exi

I wish someone would fix that issue in VNC so that it required more than eight characters. That seems especially bad and worth fixing, but nobody has done it yet.

Please, if the slashdot community is going to complain about how stupid password limits are, can someone fix the open source projects that have the same issue so that we can't point and laugh at that too?

Hello, this is AOL tech support... we have lost our database for user names, your account will not function unless you give us your account name and the first 8 letters of your password for confirmation...
Maybe I'll ask for credit cards too...

Official versions of VNC from AT&T and later RealVNC had similar password limitations, though I can't remember if it was 7 or 8 characters. All I know is that it gave me a good reason to switch to UltraVNC, which used the native login API on whatever OS it was running.

Old text adventure games were often like this. You'd type in an entire sentence, but the computer would only look at the first three letters of the first two words. I remember using "drink white paint" to drink the whiskey. (This was back when the final resting place of outdated computer games was not the $10 bargain bin, but rather having the entire source printed in a computer games magazine so people could type it into their Apple II.)

I think that Infocom, being the class act of text adventures, didn't suffer this "feature".

Nope. At some companies I worked for, the most common passwords are "password", "hockey" (I have no idea why), and "yousuck" (Windows machines). The opposite extreme is companies with password Nazis who insist that your password be a certain length, follows a certain pattern (capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols) and minimum length (eight or more characters), must be changed every 90 days, and you can't reuse the last 500 variations of the same password based on your name.

I used to tell people not to write down their passwords, but after dealing with people losing their passwords all the time, I changed my tune. I think this makes a good point [berylliumsphere.com]. There are some passwords I won't write down, but if I can carry hundreds of dollars, keys to my house and car, and credit cards with over a total credit line over 10 000USD in my pocket.

Preferably, one would just write down a hint, of course. And not on a sticky-note on the monitor.

I find that picking out just something around the desk and using it's serial number (or some other long sequence of random letters and numbers) as your password, you'll never forget it as long as you know what thing its on. Not so good, however, is when someone notices that you're looking at the back of your computer speakers everytime you log on.

This is not so bad If you keep it in a safe place you would immediatly notice missing... I keep mine (while I'm learning it anyways) in a special place in my wallet, and my wallet is nearly always on my person (or nearby)

Now those are people who do not understand the way people think. Mathematicians, not psychologists.

And they are the reason social engineering works so well.

People like having one, maybe two or three passwords.
So instead of making them change passwords regularly (and do note the analogy of having to change your front door lock every two months!), make them create one relatively secure password and drill them to memorize it, never, ever reveal it to anyone and never ever write it down.

The problem with having one good password is that it's essentially putting all your eggs in one basket. If your password is cracked in one place, then it can be used in other places. If my slashdot password is compromised, and I use the same username/password for my banking, I'll be sorry.

The other problem is with revealing passwords. I know you said never to reveal it to anyone, but everyone must reveal their password at some point. I say this because anywhere that you input your password is reveali

For systems that I access regularly (at least 2 times per week) that need a secure password, I make up a long one and memorize it. I find that I can memorize and track about 6 of those. These passwords are either login passwords or ones that protect my GPG or SSH2 keys. Basically those 6-12 passwords are the keys to my kingdom and the only ones I memorize.

For systems that I don't hit regularly, and don't need access to them from random locations or on a minute's notice while aw

The opposite extreme is companies with password Nazis who insist that your password be a certain length, follows a certain pattern

I've seen ones where they specify things like 'must be 10 characters long, contain 2 symbols, 2 numeric characters, 2 uppercase'. They don't seem to realise that they are actually *reducing* the complexity of possible passwords.

> So that's the same as in most (all?) Linux distributions by default.

Was that a question or a statement?

No linux distro that I have used in the past 8 years hashes only the leading 8 chars of a pass phrase. Even so a strong 8 char password is still a strong password (eg: *_Jilt3d) or even better with non-printable chars.

You're calling a 1337 5P34K word with two ascii characters tacked on to the beginning, "strong"? Yeah, I'm sure no one doing dictionary attacks has a leet word file.If you want a secure 8-character password, use something like,

Humans are also very bad at remembering random strings, so no, don't use the shell script posted in the parent, as it will lead to a password you'll have to write down, or will use for everything and never change. Use combinations of words and special characters, like "&URA*2me" or some such thing.

The rationale was compatibility with other UNIX-like systems, but it went away when MD5 hashing became popular and PAM was introduced. By 1998 most Linux distributions had already switched (but probably not Slackware). The rest all had it as an option. If you have a linux system today that you've upgraded repeatedly since back then (or kept the passwd/shadow files), you probably *still* have the limitation unless you forced your existing u

This means that a user who uses "password123" or any other obvious eight-character password

note that there is no reference to a section THAT COUNTS, the entire password "password123" was in QUOTES, as in "password123", and therefore, as it is the SECTION IN QUOTES that was emphasized by the author, indicates that the password in question is "password123" not "password". And it doesn't take a degree in math to note that "password123" is 11 characters long.